No, why would they be mentioned? The [in]competence of governments (or any customers) should not factor into this calculation.

What should be happening here is the people responsible for technology at the NHS should be getting fired for leaving operation systems in such a state. Still running Exchange 2003? Really? That's just straight negligence.

My company is going through this same problem, but lucky we have been half competent enough to at least use the business risk as a mean for operational change. Sounds like the NHS simply thought, "well, it's not our money."

While I agree with that (even the name tells you what should be done with it - swap it with something else) you seem that have missed that "cutting waste" is the way people associated with government services get promoted. Improvements are seen as an unfair burden on the taxpayer.Oddly enough people who talk of "running government like a business" are the first to NOT run it like a business which would see upgrades as spending necessary f

Sorry, thats a load of bollocks - the NHS has had over half a decade to do something about their situation and they failed, so its not the software operator thats at fault here, and any attempt to do as you say could be seen as undue and unwarranted restraint of trade, and open the country up to WTO issues.

UK law requires that a purchase be fit for a reasonable period of time (depending on the item involved, but the maximum time is typically six years), and XP is well past that test - saying the government

Sorry you are just full of shite............... news at 11 fit for purpose laws in the UK the term you were so clearly desperately trying to avoid ( as it is specifically illegally excluded in M$ EULAs http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/... [adviceguide.org.uk]. So regardless of your deceit, regardless of a company claiming to exclude fit for purpose, in the UK consumer laws categorically state that products must be fit for purpose. And by no stretch of the imagination can anyone claim that a software product, oh my, wear the fu

I'm afraid its actually *you* who is full of shit in this case, as the Sales of Goods Act 1979 and its amendments are precisely what I am referring to, and as I have intimate knowledge of that act and its various legal successes, I can safely say that you are full of bollocks.

The Sales of Goods Act is not meant to cover a product for all eternity, for an indefinite period, until the product actually wears out or for any other purpose than to require a manufacturer to provide a reasonable life span for the product in question. The Sales of Goods Act is not even intended to require a manufacturer to fix bugs or issues past the reasonable period of support, just provide a reasonable period of support.

So lets see what other Operating Systems have endured longer than Windows XP...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 - released in mid-2002, died in mid-2009.Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 - released in late-2003, died at the start of this year.Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 - released in early-2005, dies at the end of this year.

OSX 10.1 - released late-2001, died mid-2002.OSX 10.2 - released mid-2002, died mid-2003.OSX 10.3 - released late-2003, died mid-2005.OSX 10.4 - released mid-2005, died late-2007.OSX 10.5 - released late-2006, died late-2009.OSX 10.6 - released mid-2009, died late-2011.OSX 10.7 - released mid-2010, died late-2012.OSX 10.8 - released mid-2012, death TBD.

Hmm, I can't see any other consumer or corporate desktop OS that has been supported as long as XP has.

So out of all other reasonable time periods for Operating Systems, XP's support length is definitely an outlier and you would get laughed out of court if you tried to force Microsoft to support it beyond its current and well known EOL date.

If you are giving any sort of legal advice based around the Sales of Goods Act, please fucking stop as you have proved that you know shit about the topic.

You must be so warped with hatred, because your posts are starting to become incoherent.

The legal issue of "reasonableness" is well tested, and it doesn't go your way (fortunately). Software cannot wear out, but the Sales of Goods Act is not about forcing an entity to support anything until it wears out, its about ensuring the product lasts for a reasonable period of time - so your car doesn't die catastrophically in two years time, so your fridge doesn't stop working a year from now, so you know that when you invest a significant sum of money into something, it can last a reasonable period of time.

13 years is a reasonable time, as is 6. And the software doesn't stop working after the EOL date, it just won't receive updates, so it hasn't even "worn out".

Its also worth noting that software does not necessarily fall under the Sales of Goods Act, or its amendments - case law in the UK provides for it as a per-case consideration, and not a standard entitlement.

Especially seeing as a government can and reasonable do so, demand that if a software companying refuses to support software already purchases it should by law be required to open up the source of that software so that it can be supported by others or warrant that the support is now finally free of all bugs and security flaws.

Lol. It would be interesting to see what the UK government would do with that source code..

I think they will. And it may well turn out to be a very cheap option compared to the alternatives.

When you think of it, paying 6 million pounds to postpone the conversion of a few million XP boxes (which the UK government isn't yet ready to do) for a year or risk even greater vulnerability than XP has now, isn't expensive.

Of course considerations like these are usually lost on Open Source advocates whose mental horizon is limited to the idea of installing Open Source operating systems on PC's without

I was more thinking, at least for UK users, why can't the government arrange for MS to make those patches publicly available? After all it's tax payer's money they use for it. And that means all of the UK citizens contribute to it, one way or another. It'd only be fair for those patches to be available for the rest of them as well.

After which it's of course just a small step to make it available to the world - and do the Internet at large a big favour.

REAL VIRTUALITY, Seattle, Thursday 2099 (NNN) — Microsoft Corporation has announced a limited one-off extension of availability of its Windows XP operating system to April 2101 after criticism from large customers and analysts. This is the fifty-sixth extension of XP’s availability since 2008.

Through successive releases of Microsoft’s flagship Windows operating system, demand for XP has remained an important factor for businesses relying on stable XP-specific software and installations, who have pushed back strongly against the software company’s attempts to move them to later versions. Windows administration skills have become rare in recent years and consultants have demanded high fees. Reviving Windows administrators from cryogenic freezing has proven insufficient to fill the market gap, as almost all begged to work on COBOL instead.

“Windows XP is currently in the extremely very prolonged super-extended support phase and Microsoft encourages customers to migrate to Windows for Neurons 2097 as soon as feasible,” said William Gates V, CEO and great-grandson of the company founder. “Spare change?”

Microsoft Corporation, along with Monsanto Corporation and the RIAA, exists as a protected species in the Seattle Memorial Glass Crater Bad Ideas And Warnings To The Future National Park in north-west Washington on the radioactive remains of what was once the planet Earth, under the protection of our Linux-based superintelligent robot artificial intelligence overlords. Company revenues for 2098 were over $15.

Considering just how many Windows XP systems the must have, with a sizable fraction of them being the sort you CAN’T upgrade (due to there being no Linux or Win 7 version of some software packages, literally or practically), this was probably the best option.

From Microsoft’s perspective, they want to stop supporting an ancient OS. So it’s reasonable for them to charge for additional support. It’s actually probably the UK government that got the better deal here, since Microsoft would be able to function a bit more efficiently if they could just chuck it.

Someone else mentioned DRM for old software that you can’t virtualize, like those old printer port dongles that were required to run some software. I don’t know UK law, but I’m betting it’s illegal right now to crack or reverse engineer those things, like the DMCA in the US. If I were in parliament, I’d be about ready to propose a bill to make it legal to crack them in just this sort of situation, where you’re not violating the original intent of the license agreement. Just one license to one machine. In some cases, the DRM was moronic anyway, because the software is useless without the much more expensive piece of equipment it was attached to.

It goes both ways, though. At a company I once worked for, we sold some recording software that worked with our graphics cards. It turns out that since it was just an X11 extension, it would work with other graphics cards, so one govermnent entity started making unlicensed copies and using them with competitors’ cards. We were pissed. We were pissed that they were violating the licensing agreement, and we were pissed that we had to add some bullshit license key system to ensure that they complied with our contractual agreements. We didn’t believe in it, and we didn’t want to waste the resources on it. (And we all hated things like Flex LM with a passion. Most unreliable and brittle system on the planet.) But it was easier than trying to sue them or even just argue with them. We used a technological means to make it super inconvenient (not not impossible) to not comply with already-agreed licensing terms, and they kept buying more of our products without so much as a minor disagreement (because they knew they were in the wrong in the first place and were in no position to complain). It also means that when they want to migrate a copy of the software from an old machine that died to a new one, it’s inconvenient for both them and us. But they made their bed.

Its a chicken and egg question. Which came first.net4 or the need for it.

The answer to that likely could save the money but it rests on developers and maybe replacing spme of them.

But on the other hand, this can be avoided by requiring cross platform development or functionality for all software government uses unless it can be demonstrated to be impractical. I say that not only with linux in mind but apple and ever newer versions of windows that seem to break compatability to some things in older version

It's actually worse than that. We have a number of systems where I am which was just recently upgraded to XP, including the main security system for the buildings. It ran on Windows 2000 up until a year ago or so.

You have a lab microscope that costs Â£100,000. It's been working for 10 years and does exactly what you need. Attached to it is a PC to do image processing. That PC is supplied as part of the machine and includes one-off software to operate the microscope.

Now you say, of course, just ask how much it costs to get the equivalent software for 7, eh? Simple. But the microscope manufacturer hasn't sold anything to you in ten years. So they'll sell you a Windows 7 version. They'll charge you Â£90,000 for it. Or for Â£95,000 they'll sell you it attached to a new microscope worth Â£90,000 on it's own.

What do you do?

Well, actually you work for the NHS. Which had fuck-all money as it pisses it away on management consultants. So instead of either option, you get fuck-all. Now when the attached PC dies, you need to hope your IT guys have an image. When your IT guys move to Windows 7 for the central system, you better hope it can connect to it to store the images. You can't virtualise it because the DRM on the interface cost the manufacturer at least Â£10,000 to implement to stop you doing precisely that.

Now you're screwed. You can't put your lab slides into the national health system without a lot of manual pissing about. You can't justify buying just the Windows 7 version of the software / drivers (because you might as well just buy a new microscope, and that would come under buildings budget or medical equipment, not IT upgrades). You can't negotiate them down anywhere near sense. You can't replace the machine and - eventually - it's going to die.

And every year the microscope manufacturer puts up their prices by Â£10,000.

Now multiply by every hospital in the country.Now multiply by every piece of large equipment (genetics machines, blood samplers, X-Ray machines, ECG's, MRI's, etc.).

Soon, it just becomes better to leave it the fuck alone and wait until you NEED to do something. Then you can justify it, now that it's broken and you need it. And then you can get the government to step in and negotiate a deal. That's what's happened. And the government have said "For fuck's sake!" and gone to MICROSOFT rather than the multitude of equipment manufacturers.

Think I'm exaggerating? My girlfriend is a geneticist in an NHS hospital. The machine she works on is 15 years old, dog-slow compared to the state of the art, and runs off Windows XP embedded. When it dies, the IT team has to track down an old IDE hard drive to fit into it and image it back. And she has to manually transfer images to the "real" integrated system to put them on patient records.

And the NHS haven't even BEGUN to get off Windows XP on the desktop where she works. Precisely because of, and a contributing factor to, this shit.

Shouldn’t these negotiations happen between the government and the vendor before the original contract is ever signed, instead of between the government and Microsoft in sudden death overtime? It’s just as negligent to lock yourself into a rapacious business relationship as it is to put off necessary upgrades until vendors have you over a barrel.

"Negotiations" were completed on the basis of a thick brown envelope handed to a party now living in a warm climate. Documentation relating to "performance criteria" were handed to the police sone years ago, but have since been "accidentally" shredded. News at 10.

You isolate it from the general users production network and the internet and move on. From the sounds of it, that device should be running an embedded OS and should be treated as such.

You no longer have support for bugs, etc. deal with it.

However, you have had better learn for next time that when you purchase a device worth 100k pounds there sure as shit better be some sort of support contract in place. Or you're going to end up in the same situation next time.

Also... it is a cost of doing business. We all have the same issues. If you're not going to be bloody careful to isolate it, you are running the gauntlet and need to do a risk assessment and come up with a contingency plan for when it all goes pear shaped. Once you've done the risk assessment, you make the call on what to do. That may be upgrade, it may be isolate until the equipment goes end of life.

Sitting on your hands and whining "waaah it is too expensive" is a cop out - not an action plan. You

How much of a security risk is this lab microscope? Yes the lab tech will email the images to the doctor responsible for the case, or copy them onto a shared network drive, so there is some outside connection, but the risk can be managed.

If Microsoft has half-a-brain, they will see this as the business opportunity it is. Charge a fee for additional support from every government and organization that will pay, and it's quite the business model

disconnect it from the networkpromote the guy that said 5 years ago that you need starting to save money for replacementfire the guy who blocked thatstart saving the money for the replacementYou think that I'm starting to save money for my new car only after my old car breaks completely?

Hi and welcome to the government. In general, we don't get to save money. Each year we get a budget, at the end of the year they gather it all up in the national surplus/deficit and we start over at zero with a new budget. Without acts of the relevant national assembly to create permanent funds what you are suggesting is illegal. Even transferring funds from one year's budget to the next because the project as suffered a delay is bureaucratic and risky - anyone higher up might decide to ax the project to re

The new version still does not deliver the promised features from ten years ago so why not keep the one with the bigger theoretical feature list:)

To be honest, the 2003 version is far less of a piece of shit than earlier ones. I did a bare metal recovery drill with an earlier version which demonstrated very clearly that it was a shambolic pile of barely communicating different programs as fragile as glass, slow as a dead dog, and only truly reliably backed up with just about all of it shut down. Open relay by default after one patch and some options were only available with registry hacks - it should never have been released in such a state. The only sane way to operate it for only 100 mailboxes was two servers (for when one went down, which happened every couple of weeks due to a memory leak, and for enough speed at peak times) and a real mail transfer agent in between it and the wild internet.

When a hammer works, you don't get a new one just because there is a new one. Upgrades cost a fortune for most businesses and upgrades nearly always break some part of the business process. Most businesses have been burned by the upgrade process in the past and when they start putting a dollar figure on the upgrade vs the cost of not doing the upgrade, it is often cheaper to not do the upgrade.

No, but XP isn't a hammer. It's a much more complicated piece of equipment than that. To use a workshop analogy - it's say, a bandsaw or hydraulic press that no longer meets any current safety standards. It is end of life and either needs to have safeguards installed (in XP's case, isolation from the internet and the rest of your production network) or be replaced.

We have 8 Windows NT4 machines where I work. Although we are upgrading one next year. The cost isn't too bad, $180000 will get us a Windows 7 machine. The machine runs software which is tied to specific and very expensive hardware via very restrictive certification from TUV. The software runs just fine on Windows 7 and I've even got a 10base2 network card working to connect to the old system, however doing so would be illegal. So we're stuck with it.

From what i know chromebooks is a joke... They are all online... Even google online services have proven to not work 100%. You need a physical storage system. Not some cloud storage crap. Cause it will go down and it will go down at the worst time. Ohh you want to access that bill you wrote sorry google services are dont try back in a hour. Just wont cut it.
For that reason London council is stupid. I would never trust my important data to a cloud service cause when i need it most it wont be there.

Let's see: the summary mentions that "last September 85% of the NHS's 800,000 computers were running XP" which translates to 680,000 computers. A Chromebook is like $200 a pop, so migrating all of them would cost $136,000,000. Not such a big saving, is it?

Not to mention that being tied hands and feet to [insert any company here] is no better than being tied hands and feet to Microsoft, you'd have a ridiculous amount of local storage and no control whatsoever over how (and where) your other data is stored. And I can easily imagine that they also have lots of custom-made applications that wouldn't run in Chrome OS anyway.

Switching to Chromebooks might not be the best plan for the NHS but it was the best plan for the London Council. The conversion from XP to a new operating system is more likely to be driven by business requirements than it is to be driven by FOSS ideology. Large organizations may prefer to be bound hand and feet to Apple, Google or Microsoft if it meets their business requirements. It's the modern day version of "No one was ever fired for buying IBM."

Add the cost of re-training, software compatibility testing, a pilot program, etc. and those costs will blow out MASSIVELY.

Anyone in IT worth their salt knows that the software license cost is a tiny part of the TCO or cost to change. There are huge amounts of other costs involved and they are really hard to calculate. Switching platforms is a risk. Switching from XP to say, 7 is a big enough risk with big enough costs and there's a high level of application compatibility there. Switching to ChromeOS

Switching to a new operating system is simple in theory but difficult in practice. I work at a company that delayed an upgrade to Windows 7 for several years because critical applications would only work with Internet Explorer 6. Linux is free but there are other costs associated with switching to Linux. I suspect that the training costs alone would be an enormous part of the project budget.

It is sll the next trap. Linux fistros EOL their versions too. Some times its a lot quicker then 8 or 12 years. And whatever the lifespan of a version is today, it can change on a whim next month. I have seen it happen first hand.

Even the open sorce web browser thst claim you are free but turns out to be only as long as you agree with them politically has dtopped support for OS versions on a whim with little notice forcing the same.

At least with MS, you have a fixed time line that you csn realistically expe

I suspect that the training costs alone would be an enormous part of the project budget.

Yes, I paid thousands to be trained to find that KDE start button, and thousands more to find that "Libre Office Writer (Word Processor)" entry in the menu. Then I needed to be shown where all the letter keys were again. Then that Ctrl-s to save what I'd done - took me months on courses to get the hang of it.

There are a LOT of people that make significantly more money than you do that all of that is actually very hard. they freak out if they cant use the swirly E to get to the internet.

Executives are stupid, marking is stupid, sales is stupid. you can not change things too drastically or all the stupid people will start whining hard, and they are all above you so they can make your life hell.

Switching to a new operating system is simple in theory but difficult in practice. I work at a company that delayed an upgrade to Windows 7 for several years because critical applications would only work with Internet Explorer 6. Linux is free but there are other costs associated with switching to Linux. I suspect that the training costs alone would be an enormous part of the project budget.

The training costs for switching to Windows 8 would be an enormous part of the project budget, too.

That's what's really killing MS. They've gotten to the point where it's just as expensive to keep riding the MS train as it is to bite the bullet and switch to Linux.

What gives Linux the competitive avantage there is that Linux doesn't have to look and feel different in major and minor ways every time you upgrade it, thus requiring expensive retraining. They're not driven by a marketing department. What do they call the "Network Neighborhood" in this release???

My guess is that the government cuts to the NHS have led to a situation where they do not have enough skilled engineers with time to support any change to the status quo. The current governing party is ideologically opposed to the NHS and is unlikely to support anything that would improve matters.

Because, assuming that all the industry (in my case, hospitality) specific software works in wine, then between the hurdles of convincing upper management to switch to Linux, training every user how to use a new operating system, and trying to convince tech support from our vendors to help us even though we are on a technically unsupported operating system, it's honestly cheaper just to upgrade to Windows 7.

In the hospitaliy inndustry, some of the better application suits run in a browser session hosted off site by the company who sold it.

Not that it negates anything you mentioned. I just wanted to point you into that direction. I had a site with over 300 rentals at 4 locations surrounding state and federal parks spanning about 5 miles at each. Switching apps for the management of those to one of the web base ones was the smartest thing we did. It was a pain at first and we ran the old system along side the ne

The Linux desktop environment holy wars are almost as bad as the operating system holy wars. Linux Users Have a Choice: 8 Linux Desktop Environments [howtogeek.com] A lot of companies have adopted Linux in the data center but don't use Linux on the desktop. I suspect that the uncertainty around the future of any given Linux desktop environment is a good reason for companies to stick to Mac OS or Windows.

It takes them so long in the morning to decide whether to use an LXDE session or Gnome, or KDE, that by the timne they have made upo their minds, its time to go home (or a new desktop has ben released).

Should have stuck with the original sh(), and not had a choice of csh, bash, etc, thats what I say.

And that relevance pales into insignificancy when you consider what you would have to replace application wise, as in the real world people dont just boot to a desktop and then sit and stare at it for their working day.

Office applications might be easy to replace, but how about certified xray or MRI viewers, medical record viewers etc?

This is exactly it. I know one hospital that recently "refreshed" their hardware to new Quad core 4th generation i5 desktops. The OS - Windows XP SP1. Why?

The specialist medical applications that they run are too expensive to upgrade, and the version they run doesn't support XP SP2. Medical software is not cheap - something like a "results reporting system" which aggregates test results from multiple departments (e.g. blood chemistry, hematology, MRI, ultrasound, physiology, cardiology, etc.) and presents them to a physician - can cost $1million for the license. For a PACS (X-ray viewing and archiving) software, the license could easily cost $10 million for a large hospital (or group of hospitals).

If it would cost you $2 million to replace a specialist app, then you may be stuck with having to use an older OS - especially, if the app developer has gone out of business and you no longer have any support (very, very common in the medical industry).

Some of the more forward thinking IT departments have started rolling out Windows 7, and using some sort of virtualization service, to run the specialist apps under the appropriate OS/IE version/Java runtime/.NET runtime that each one needs. The difficulty with this, is that you essentially have not just your Win7 environment to manage, but also all the individual virtualized run time environments. The administrative burden that this requires can be substantial.

I was last month negotiating over the purchase of a results reporting and communication system. I spoke to one of the biggest suppliers and asked what platforms they supported: "We support Windows 7 with IE 8." "We're increasing moving to mobile devices, what support do you have for Windows 8, IE9, Mac OS, Android, iOS and other browsers such as Safari, Chrome and firefox". "We will be adding Windows 8 support in our next annual update, which will be available for

like the people in various UK goverment offices have any idea what "vendor lock-in" even is...some of them have been using Office since it first came out, no one outside of us techies cares about "proprietary" vs. open-source. Often, a corp will go with the proprietary software because there is a vendor they can engage in a 24/7 SLA. Linux has Redhat under Novell, I don't know of any other company that can provide 24/7 under 30 minute support. This isn't some private company that can call up their local

I was recently purchasing some specialist medical software, and one of the key terms in the contract specified by senior management, was "the software should not contain any open-source components, except where no close-source alternative exists, and the vendor must ensure that appropriate restrictions over access to the source code are maintained at all times during the duration of the contract".

Actuallym, they're MORE likely to get the SLA they want from Free software. Simple reason, the vendor can always dig in to the code themselves. They don't have to depend on a company an ocean (and 7 time zones) away that may or may not respond, may or may not accept that the bug really is a bug, and *IF* they fix it, it will be when they damned well feel like it and not a moment sooner. Also because of Free software, there can be many choices of vendor. With proprietary software, there is exactly one choice

what you run as an OS has as much relevance to anyone else as what my next door neighbour had for lunch 3 weeks ago.

Three weeks ago your neighbour had packed lunch which was overpriced , had an attractive wrapping but tasted average, he had to buy salt and spices seperately ( overpriced ) . The nutrition profile was so unhealthy that he'd need to be an Arnold Schwarzzenegger to digest it. After three weeks of eating that meal your neighbour started sending junk messages to all the people he knew and doing other strange things.

Now he wishes he'd just RTFM and cook his own meal.. Or maybe just eat some Ubuntu

Where the cooking instructions are vague, wrong and refer to an early beta version of "grub" and only work if you have exactly the same cooker as the inventor. Where you have to spend half a day growing your own ingredients, just so's it is "free". Where the size and shape of the plate you need changes every 6 months and none of the cutlery matches. As for the list of contents, all it says is:

What I would like to know is how much would it have cost to upgrade to Linux? As a UK Taxpayer, I would prefer my money to be invested in Linux systems instead of Microsoft.

Much more than that, obviously. You don't replace the operating system, reinstall and develop specialist applications for £5 a PC. Of course, paying for extended support doesn't move you forward, so you have to some sort of migration next year.

And really, as a taxpayer (IMHO), you (and I) should be wondering how the NHS managed to piss £10 billion away on a failed IT project, and how we can avoid them doing it again. £5 million across the whole of government is fairly small beer to keep existing systems going, compared to the amount you could blow on a load of migration projects.

It sucks that some departments are going to miss the deadline but the questions I'd like to know the answer to are 'what are their migration projects for next year?' and 'are they on track to be completed before the extended support runs out?'. Have they got a credible plan, and it's just slipped a little, or is it a total fuck up? That, to me, is the big money question.

In the NHS? A huge amount, since its basically run on third party applications developed for Windows. The last lot that tried essentially what you are suggesting (rewrite the entire NHS infrastructure so its unified) ended up spending well into the tens of billions of pounds before the project was cancelled.

Also, as a UK taxpayer, id prefer my money get spent on solutions that work rather than solutions that play to the idiosyncrasies of the geek/nerd population.

If I had a dollar for every time I have heard of someone that has used a Microsoft product (Access included) for the wrong thing (or used the wrong Microsoft product) I would probably have enough money that I wouldn't need to work for such people anymore (to be fair, the last job I had was a job replacing an Access based system with a much better VB.NET/SQL Server system (my part was converting reports from Access to SQL Server Reporting Services)

As another UK tax payer, I fully support the Honorable gentleman above, In fact, as a victim of MS software, i would prefer it to go on "fact finding missions" "consultancy" from "Miss I Cane" (or Ms Whiplash) and duck houses than to MS.

If you were an actual IT person, you would know the pain of finding/installing Windows Drivers far exceeds that for doing it in Linux (Its easy to find Linux NVidia drivers - they just dont work very well).

The only thing windows does that linux doesn't is directX and better gaming support, which will soon change if valve is sucessful, people will switch because they don't want to pay $200 a year just to browse the internet

The biggest thing that windows provides to the NHS is continuity. The second most important feature (a corollary) is a trained user base - one that knows the in's and out's, bug, vagiaries and shortcuts of the existing system. Following on from that is a known, compatible set of hardware that interfaces with all the other systems (after years of development, testing and debugging) and importantly: is reliable in a life-or-death environment where patients wellbeing is at stake.

which will soon change if valve is sucessful

Valve? Seriously? you're talking about playing little computer games in a hospital environment?

No they will buy cheap ass tablets/phones to do that for them and keep a Windows desktop for business/enterprise. The bottom line is that the standard Linux distributions currently out there will never be *on the desktop* popular it's pretty much a moot point.

1) White space is your friend.2) Don't abbreviate the word people. It makes you look like an 16 year old. Oh, and capitalize the word "I".3) Take your meds, you are obviously having some kind of breakdown. Calm down.

There are tons of documentation for Linux. The problem is it is scattered all over the place, written by thousands of volunteers in nearly as many different styles, non-uniform structures, various degrees of success and thoroughness at cross-referencing other relevant documentation, etc. which makes getting things done under Linux a lot more frustrating for the uninitiated than it should be when compared against VisualStudio and MSDN.

Microsoft's APIs might not be the prettiest or cleanest but they are quite

There are tons of documentation for Linux. The problem is it is scattered all over the place, written by thousands of volunteers in nearly as many different styles, non-uniform structures, various degrees of success and thoroughness at cross-referencing other relevant documentation, etc. which makes getting things done under Linux a lot more frustrating for the uninitiated than it should be when compared against VisualStudio and MSDN.

Microsoft's APIs might not be the prettiest or cleanest but they are quite well documented in a very uniform and coherent manner, which makes them relatively pleasant to work with.

In either case though, most people end up writing wrappers to take care of the redundant, tedious and unintuitive bits so they only need to worry about them once so it is not too much of an issue either way much beyond the first time.

When Linux was still fairly new to me, I got my "one-stop shopping" for Linux documentation from the Linux Documentation Project (tldp.org). For major program products - the kind that you'd have to pay extra for in Windows - I'd get books from O'Reilly.

These days, I'm as likely to google for help, but even today I sometimes arrive at tldp.

Microsoft docs have generally been good, but about the time I was beginning to leave that scene, they moved them online and prioritized stuff so that that WinCE API docs c

The only problem with switching to Linux is the applications. Most governments and companies have applications they rely on and sadly they are only on windows.The sheer amount of utter crap VB6 stuff that is STILL in use inside corporations is mind boggling.

If someone was serious about linux adoption they would dump several million into having applications written for linux that businesses would use. There are no useable linux accounting packages. everything is absolute garbage in the FOSS world. There